Laugh Tracks
Destroy_all is a terrifying command. With this being the first project of Mod 2, there were several things of which to be afraid; however, the command destroy_all got me the most.
To get started, I drew the layout of my webpage. My primary concern though, was not the layout, it was the functionality, so I admittedly spent less time on the design planning portion than I would prefer.
User-Story-7 gave me biggest headache throughout this project. I tried to follow the principle of AAAWTF (Always, always, always write tests first); however, sometimes, I don’t write great tests (I’m learning!), and I get stuck because the test I’ve written isn’t useful or is potentially incorrect. The lesson I seem to learn every week is not to be married to any one idea in particular and be open to considering all possibilities when I’m hard stuck on some element of my code. I needed to reach out for help on this user story, and it took a new set of eyes to help me see that my test was causing my error and not my actual code.
As compared to other projects that we’ve completed at Turing thus far, this particular project gave us quite a bit more creative license. I am 7 weeks new to programming and 4 days new to design, so my webpage still sort of looks like it’s from 1995, but I’m actually still proud of how far I’ve come and how this project turned out.
By nature, I am a rule follower. I was a math major in college, and I love it when tasks are completed and I can check off the steps I needed to take and show my work at the end of the day. I did one tiny branch off of the required rubric, and I think it’s sort of clever. The comedians I chose for my page are all living; however, one of my favorite one-liners comes from a comedian who is no longer with us:
I wanted to incorporate this quote into my design somehow, so I decided to try to create an error page that would override Sinatra’s normal 404 error: “Sinatra doesn’t know this ditty.” What I came up with *should* work for any page that doesn’t exist or would normally produce an error, and it looks like this:
If I had to start this project over from scratch, I would save design ideas completely for the end. I came up with additional ideas for design layout after I made some additional changes based on user stories; however, I felt as though I’d already gone all-in on Bootstrap design and was too far gone to make significant changes nearing the end. I think as I get more comfortable with CSS design, I’ll realize that I’m probably not all that committed to Bootstrap with the amount of code I have and could probably easily get out of where I am currently; however, today is not that day.
Testing in Sinatra is still very new for me. I’m slowly learning the difference between method and feature testing, and I hope to get better at this as time goes on. For now though, I hope you’ll take some time to revisit the comedians you may not have considered for a while and remember why you liked them in the first place.
